The First Decade of Agency, an Anarchist PR Project

NEVER HEARD OF YA

Oct

21

2024

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From Anarchist Agency

Just over a decade ago, a small group of anarchist media activists started what they defined as an anarchist PR project—Agency was officially launched. As we develop a vision and plans for the next decade, we want to share how Agency came to be, how it has evolved, what we have accomplished, and how we hope to spread anarchist ideas and practices into the future.

The seeds of Agency were planted in 2012, when a few of us helped organize a public and widely-viewed debate between CrimethInc. and journalist-activist Chris Hedges about the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and specifically perspectives on violence and property destruction in contemporary social movements. Agency emerged from our recognition of the need to facilitate a better understanding of anarchist ideals among the general public.

We spent 2013 building the collective; the following year, Agency was officially launched when our website premiered. Agency was founded on the heels of social movements like Occupy, but the project was also inspired by anarchist practices honed during the Global Justice movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which included new decentralized forms of media like the global Independent Media Center network, and high profile direct action campaigns and mass mobilizations that garnered regular international media attention on anarchist organizing. 

Agency took lessons learned from these and other projects, along with our own analysis of the weaknesses and strengths of mainstream media coverage of anarchist theories and practices, to build a resource that offers a better understanding of anarchism and ties it into interconnected issues including war, racism, heterosexism, economic and social injustice, and the rise of neofascism. By inserting anarchist ideas into timely mainstream political discourse through commentaries, a newswire, and other content, Agency seeks to help fellow anarchist organizers and groups make often unheard and misrepresented anarchist perspectives better understood.

Check out our Agency Chronology for articles, interviews, press releases, and other content we’ve created in a readily available archive of 10+ years of anarchist commentary and responses to timely issues.

Black Liberation and Anti-Fascism Shape the Trajectory of Agency

Anarchist movements are often inclined toward fresh and urgent thinking. But ten years ago, the landscape of social movement organizing was lacking new public-facing anarchist projects. Agency was founded at a time of racial upheaval in the US, punctuated by the killings of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Eric Garner that helped, however tragically, to propel the Black Lives Matter movement. Black liberation, along with police and prison abolition, became a left political centerpiece in the last decade, and a focus of the struggles around which countless anarchists have organized.

Meanwhile, new Indigenous sovereignty struggles were also taking shape. We saw the labor movement initiate innovative organizing tactics that won substantial victories for the working class. Expert reports warned of the next extinction event: record-breaking heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods compelled organizing on a massive and international scale to fight the fossil fuel industry and other contributors to the climate crisis. Entrenched neoliberalism, a seemingly ever-expanding wealth gap, and a housing market that is increasingly out of reach for many Americans also prompted widespread resistance. And the countervailing rise of a new fascism compelled anarchists to refocus on the antifascist struggle that has been part of our DNA for the better part of the last century. In 2020, the US Department of Justice invented a new term, “anarchist jurisdiction,” as a propaganda tool and a means to repress left and radical activists. All of these developments created new challenges but also opened up fresh opportunities for anarchist education and organizing.

We were also seeing dramatic changes in the media itself. An explosion of workplace organizing by journalists has coincided with the industry’s shift away from print and a corresponding dramatic loss of jobs at outlets across the country. Paradoxically, more anarchists have managed to find a voice for themselves within the corporate media or with innovative online outlets over the past decade. And while the rise of corporate social media has often been followed by its co-optation, social media has also created new opportunities for movements seeking to broadcast liberatory narratives.

Agency Amplifies Anarchists in the News and Anarchist Voices

Agency exists in part to study and expose how anarchist movements are covered by corporate news providers so that, as anarchists, we can make better informed choices as to how or whether we want to interact with them. Ever since our website launched, it has been a crucial resource for anarchist theory and practice. Anarchists in the News provides a constantly updated collection of mainstream media articles in which anarchism and anarchists appear. Critical Voices is Agency’s platform for amplifying anarchist commentary on current events originally published elsewhere. These pieces call attention to issues of direct concern to anarchists and contribute to a radical examination of power relations, the state, and capitalism. We also issue press briefs that clarify the anarchist perspective on issues and events that reporters and editors don’t typically regard as having one, such as the spread of the Ebola virus.

News never sleeps, the saying goes, and neither should the anarchist response. Agency Newswire traces both mainstream and alternative media, highlighting pivotal political struggles and social movements over the years, including: resistance to state power in places like Greece, Hong Kong, Rojava, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and Palestine; Black Lives Matter and the 2020 uprisings across the US, sparked by the police murder of George Floyd; the rise of antifascism and militant responses to white supremacist organizing in Charlottesville, at the Trump inauguration, and in the targeting of anarchists and antifa during the Trump presidency; mobilizations to stop fossil fuel-based projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, Keystone XL, and Line 3; the Stop Cop City movement at the intersection of radical environmentalism and police abolition; the resurgence of mutual aid networks, especially in addressing the tragic impacts of COVID-19 and the climate crisis; and the hardline responses to attacks on abortion access, like Jane’s Revenge.

Through our original commentary pieces, Agency has aimed to bring a vital anarchist perspective to the discourse around urgent issues that need an anti-state, anti-capitalist analysis but seldom get one. Some of these articles are generated by Agency members, others are solicited and written by other anarchist writers, activists, and journalists. Topics and themes we’ve covered over the years include: an anarchist response to Ebola; the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; sexual assaults on campus; antifa and the rise of fascism; anarchist perspectives on J20, both in anticipation and in the aftermath of the Trump inauguration; Emma Goldman’s 150th birthday and her continuing influence; the tradition of May Day protests; mutual aid, from an Indigenous anarchist perspective, and dispatches from the front lines; mass surveillance; and social media censorship.

Changing the Public’s Response to Media

Agency also issues press releases on timely and relevant events in the anarchist movement itself. Some of our most recent have focused on the untimely death in 2023 of our comrade Jen Angel, an Agency co-founder, long-time anarchist, and media activist, and her enduring legacy of fighting for transformative justice.Our newsletters are another way we  keep readers and followers updated on our work. You can sign up to receive our newsletter, and view an archive here.

Agency doesn’t just follow and comment on the news, however. We work to change how the public absorbs and responds to the media. In 2019 and 2020, we conducted a series of interviews with radical and anarchist-identified journalists, highlighting their work and sharing their insights. This Agency series, which included interviews with Dan Arel, Shane Burley, Natasha Lennard, and Abby Martin, addressed what it’s like being an explicitly left journalist, issues they’ve faced working in the corporate media, the importance of non-mainstream, left publications, and why engaging with media is important to the advancement of anarchist ideas.

In 2021, we began to explore the visual medium as a way to broadcast anarchist ideas when we partnered with AK Press to produce “What is the State?” an animated video primer based on Eric Laursen’s book, “The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State.” The following year, we launched Finding Agency, a livestream series that kicked off with an interview with Daryle Lamont Jenkins, examining his campaign to expose the new racist neofascism.

We’re dedicated to helping make media activism and anarchist interventions with public discourse a widespread, grassroots practice. In 2023, Agency launched a media grants program for radical writers, artists, and creators in collaboration with the Institute for Anarchist Studies which, following the tragic loss of Agency co-founder Jen Angel, became the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant to honor her legacy. The program helps fuel the types of projects that Jen created throughout her life: projects that make anarchist ideas accessible and reflect the spirit of do-it-yourself action. The core tenets of anarchism that underscored Jen’s life and work—autonomy, mutual aid, voluntary association, direct action—are all amplified by the independent media projects we fund through our anarchist media grants.

Working with Activists and Organizers to Build Skills to Advance Anarchist Movements

Agency also works directly with left activists and anarchist organizers to help them hone their media and messaging skills. By coaching and training members of the anarchist community to develop effective press releases, talking points, and other content, and by training them in managing relationships with mainstream journalists, we hope to enable the next generation of anarchists to gain greater control of the media narrative.

Most recently, Agency has supported activists in the #StopCopCity movement in developing their media skills to oppose police militarization and preserve the Weelaunee Forest from destruction. Agency has been working to build the media skills of defendants charged with domestic terrorism and RICO (Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), with the aim of seizing media narratives to help fight their charges.

That doesn’t mean we avoid working  with mainstream journalists. Agency is instrumental in educating reporters and writers from mainstream, corporate outlets on anarchist issues and connecting them to the best subject matter experts to interview and cover. When an anarchist voice is needed, we make ourselves available to be interviewed for stories in print and online, on podcasts, on TV/video, and through other media formats.

Who is Agency and Where are We Going?

The members of Agency bring a diverse skill set to this work from their different backgrounds and political histories. We are activists, organizers, educators, writers, public relations workers, communications strategists, graphic designers, web designers, documentary filmmakers, and video journalists. Demystifying anarchism, making it visible to a broader public, and clarifying inaccuracies consistently perpetuated in the mainstream media are the common goals that bring all of us together.

The devastating loss of our comrade Jen Angel brings a sad close to our first decade, but it has also enabled us to share her legacy and build a grant program in her name, as a way to support cutting-edge and DIY media projects similar to those that played such a big role in her life and work. The opportunity to bring Jen’s legacy into the future has inspired us to continue our commitment to making anarchism more visible and powerful. By furthering our collaborations with fellow anarchists, troublemakers, and radical journalists, we strive to find new ways to support the fight against capitalism and the state and promote alternative visions of a more just world through media work and development of resources within our community to do so.

We’ll see you in the streets and in the headlines!

From Anarchist Agency

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Check out our Agency Chronology for articles, interviews, press releases, and other content we’ve created in a readily available archive of 10+ years of anarchist commentary and responses to timely issues.

 

British Anarchism in Decline/Renewal (delete as appropriate)

Oct

23

2024

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From Organise! by Spindrift

Its very easy to feel as though anarchism is in decline. What we hardly ever discuss is what success looks like. Maybe it’s a bit too neo-liberal to form a focus group and discuss how we measure success. A decade ago, I left London and moved to a small town in the middle of England. I was very involved with the group Class War at the time and we were really active then. I regularly went back to the capital for a bit of action. We had a bizarre election campaign going on for the 2015 general election, there was a weekly “Poor Doors” protest on the edge of the City of London and it wouldn’t be long before a campaign started to get rid of the Jack the Ripper Museum in Tower Hamlets. We got lots of publicity for these things and we enjoyed it. Anarchism felt to me like it was thriving.

Then, within two years, everything seemed different. People I knew were suddenly enthused by a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, the protests seemed to get less interesting, people stopped using black block tactics and it felt like some fizz had gone. At least that was the perception I had looking at London from afar. The anarchists I knew were still organising but it was harder to see from where I was. The perception of decline was depressing, isolating even. I now think that perception was wrong but it got worse. The Covid-19 pandemic and the national and local restrictions that came with it made political organising difficult. Difficult bit not impossible. Class War made a brief come back by producing a daily newspaper in this period and I was involved in that, which made me feel that at least something was happening. But the feeling of decline persisted.

Really though, is anarchist success measured by the number of protests that end with running street battles with the cops? Is it measured by how many magazines and newspapers we have going? Those things certainly measure something. They tell us something about the movement and how many people are willing to get involved. Having people willing to write their ideas and others willing to publish those ideas is an essential part of our movement and our history. We need some anarchists with spare time to keep the flame going. Protest is important too. It’s on protests that people might meet for the first time, forge friendships and plan future actions. So it’s forgivable to think that a decline in such things equals a decline in anarchism. I forgive myself for lapsing into this thinking.

In August, my podcast comrade (Shane Little) and I presented a talk at the Green Gathering festival’s Speaker’s Forum on anarchist organising. We were amazed to find a full attendance to the talk given our slot was first thing on the Friday of the weekend. The attendance was overwhelmingly made up of people interested in how anarchist practices could help their groups, with a smattering of actual anarchists thrown in.

Considering the audience, we decided on discussing ways of organising horizontally and non-hierarchically without adding in all the dogma (and dare I say baggage) for good measure. This wasn’t a talk about the history of anarchism, it’s links to the early socialist movement and comparisons to Marxism (although that all came up in the Q and A). This was a talk about building healthy relationships without oppression within our groups and our daily lives. It was about how we can make a difference in every group we’re involved in by challenging bad practices. It was a message received positively and the interaction between us all then focused on how we ensure that our groups work in this way. My view is that this is what we mean by the word anarchism: not something in the distant future, but in the here and now, building positive groups where everyone has maximum autonomy over decisions that affect them.

Then, out of nowhere, we got two more difficult contributions. Both men who interjected explained that they’d been anarchists for decades. They both said that the thing missing from our talk was action on the streets. Why aren’t anarchist fighting the fascists? Why aren’t anarchist fighting the police? Why aren’t we all agitating for revolution, which is the obvious ultimate aim? Frankly, I could see myself at the back of the tent shouting this stuff out. I know exactly what they meant because I’ve been there. I’ve been thinking this stuff for years. Ultimately, we could paraphrase their concern about anarchism In the UK and the state we’re in with one word: decline.

The mood changed quickly though. A woman started speaking nearer the front. She talked about the number of groups she had come across organising non-hierarchically. Others did the same. One explained how she’d started a group with this exact aim but it had failed. People had been asked to organise without a leader but they’d felt unable to do that. We talked about learning from that experience and working with groups to help them see the benefits of non-hierarchy in the early stages of group activity.

If anarchism is to be achieved via a violent revolution that seems a long way off. Meanwhile, our communities are full of organisations run to anarchist principles, perhaps there are some without any anarchists involved. Our organising tactics are infectious. Once you’ve been in a non-hierarchical setting why would you choose a leader unless you had to? Our organising principles are intoxicating because they empower people without patronisation.

Perhaps we can say street anarchism has been in decline. It will likely re-emerge at some point in a large way but we have to also accept that it can put people off our ideas. In the past I would dismiss these concerns because ‘we decide our tactics’ and ‘we don’t need your acceptance mate’. I have respect for the idea that we should express ourselves on issues in whatever way we choose but I can also see how off putting that might be to others. There’s a tension in the way we get attention.

There’s no tension, though, in the principle of horizontal organising. It’s hard work for sure. It creates tension in groups. It is time consuming because real democracy requires detailed discussion of the facts. Facts can be interpreted in different ways. Sometimes facts are distorted, manipulated. Sometimes people rely on baseless information. Real democracy requires a group ethos of education and discussion that elevates the debate. It requires people to listen more than they speak. It requires people to think about what people are saying, rather than thinking purely about what they intend to say back as a retort. Official politics is all about the retort. Debate is about the retort. Anarchist organising is about really thinking about what others say, trying to see things from their point of view and responding positively whenever possible.

All over the country groups we’ve never heard of are working in this way. There will be groups we’re in that are working just like this too. Do we need more anarchists on the streets to feel as though anarchism is thriving? The last few years have caused me to wonder these matters. I enjoyed the times I was protesting and seeing other anarchists make their point forcefully. I think I still would. I recognise though, that anarchism isn’t about converting people to the cause. We have no party we want people to join.

Our vision of the future doesn’t require everyone to agree with us. Anarchist methods of organising allow for maximum discussion and democratic decision making. It is exactly because people have different viewpoints that we don’t want one group winning and forcing their decisions on everyone else. Becoming the dominant force isn’t our aim. I would argue that it is our methods of organising that we want people to sign up to and when people are truly exposed to such methods, they rarely give up on them.

That is anarchism for me and it appears to be thriving.

Jon Bigger

Jon Bigger is a politics teacher and anarchist activist and podcaster. He produces Little Bigger Anarchism (https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/little-bigger-anarchism) with Shane Little.

 

A month after Alonso Verdejo's murder in Chile

Oct

21

2024

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From anarcoveganismo.info (instagram)
October 8, 2024

A month after the murder by a fascist bastard during the march to the general cemetery, propaganda in memory of the anti-authoritarian vegan comrade Alonso Verdejo.

"We vindicate you in this way as you would have liked, always insurrectionist, eager for illegality, decorating the streets and trains of the city with combative slogans.

Lover of the street struggle, a comrade in solidarity in multiple anarchist initiatives..

We will always remember you in our black hearts.

Alonso Verdejo Bravo, present in every strike against power. Our revenge will be terrible!"

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51 YEARS SINCE THE COUP: Compañero Alonso Verdejo killed by fascist during march to the General Cemetery
From La Zarzamora
September 9, 2024

This Sunday, during the Pilgrimage to the General Cemetery in Santiago, a man, later identified as Patricio Salerick Villafaña Juica, who was seen leaving a carabineros picket shouting that he was “contra marcha”, stabbed three people in the back, one of them was the anti-authoritarian vegan comrade Alonso Verdejo, 26 years old, who remained seriously injured in the abdomen and back, dying a few hours later at the San José hospital. The attacks by fascist groups or individuals protected by the repressive forces are increasingly common, the legitimization of the fascist discourse in the media, the political and repressive complicity, generates them shelter to act, the truth is that they sporadically murder comrades and our coordination and radicalization of self-defense is increasingly urgent.

Video records manage to capture how Alonso Verdejo is cowardly stabbed by the fascist, who was dressed in lead and holding a knife that he was hiding with something dark (it seems to be a jacket or bag). Accounts of the attendants, affirm that this man, with evident intention of attacking the people of the demonstration, kept himself between a picket of carabineros shouting that he was a “counter-marcher.” He finally wounded two people and killed Alonso.

The murders in the commemorations of the 11th, which previously have been at the hands of the carabineros of Chile, as in the case of comrade Claudia Lopez, today are being executed by fascists who take refuge among the police and their cars. Apparently it is easier for them to use other useful fools for these attacks, (commonly exalted fanatics, unthinking and servile), instead of continuing to get into trouble an institution that has risen from the ashes, thanks to a great strategy of media manipulation.

But who are they? are they paid? are they or were they pacos? These are questions that arise in this scenario, however, what is concrete is that we are in front of fascist civilians, who in groups or under the protection of the police, cowardly attack comrades who attend and participate in the marches.

This fact is no longer isolated, in July 2018, three women were stabbed during the march for free abortion. In 2022 Francisa Sandoval, communicator of signal 3 of La Victoria, was murdered in front of Meiggs street in Estación Central, by Marcelo Naranjo, who shot in full view and patience of the police. Students who were protesting had already been attacked in the same place.

The assassinations of Macarena Valdés and Bau have proven it. The ultra-right and the Chilean Nazism have henchmen, the landowner sends the foreman and the latter sends the tenant to do the dirty work, the latter goes to jail after a good agreement with the landowner. But the poor fascists are also a reality, who, lost in their nationalist and religious discourses, can take up a weapon to attack, driven by the declarations they see daily on TV and in all the communication channels of power.

The assassination of Alonso and the repression of power marked the pilgrimage of this 2024, but there is still September, and the territorial exits will leave the real account before such cowardly attacks to the memory of the assassinated and to the life of Alonso. SELF DEFENSE.

 

Fell in Love with Fire

Oct

23

2024

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From CrimethInc.

A Documentary about the 2019 Uprising in Chile

Five years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.

This is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.

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October 2019 in Santiago, Chile. The president has called in the armed forces against the people for the first time since the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.

“Wait, I don’t get it. The advertisements are untouched. There’s not even graffiti. Not a single window is broken.”

“Yes. And?”

“I mean, the shelves are all empty. Did they just evacuate all the merchandise, or was it actually looted?”

“Haha what? Of course it was looted, the whole neighborhood looted it. Well, women and children first.”

“And no one destroyed anything?”

“Look, the idea isn’t to give them a bigger insurance check. Besides, if things keep going the way they are, that building may soon be ours.”

“That would be a serious step. I can’t imagine things ever reaching this point where I come from. Good luck with your struggle.”

“No! No, no, no, brother—our struggle. You’re here. You’re in this. Tell people.”

“I don’t even know how I’d explain this to anyone back home.”

“Explain it like this: neoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die.”

The basic argument of Fell in Love With Fire on a flier: “Hop the gate of the anti-life of paying to live, living to pay.”

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On October 17, 2019, Chile’s student movement was on its heels, facing new legislation that put police in schools for the very first time. With the students’ normal organizing environment swept out of their control, the movement launched a campaign against a routine increase in public transit fare. With a right-wing billionaire in the presidency, the prospects for resistance looked dim.

Everything changed in a single day. On October 18, a small rush-hour protest at a metro transfer station triggered a stoppage of Santiago’s entire public transit system. As commuters were stuck in hot traffic, images of police beating students began to circulate on their phones.

Santiago exploded. In one weekend, over a hundred metro stations were attacked, with ten completely destroyed. A quarter of the Wal-Marts (the largest grocery chain) in Chile were looted or burned. The government declared martial law in response to civil disturbance for the first time since the 1973-1990 Pinochet military dictatorship—but the people would not back down.

Chile graffiti reel, 2019-2020.

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Stories from the Making of

We decided to take a break from our country after I finally beat criminal charges resulting from participating in combative political activity. We had just crossed the border out of Ecuador when we heard reports about an uprising there. Peasants were marching on the capitol, choking off the highways to force the president to reverse proposed austerity measures.

You said, “We should go back.”

I said, “If it were Chile…”

Just two weeks later, it was.

I’m not from Chile, but I lived there for years.

We arrived in Santiago a week before everything exploded, and almost immediately encountered an evasión [a collective fare-dodging action] that students were staging. It was your first time in Chile, and I was excited for you to get a small taste of student rebellion. And, hey, getting where we were going quicker without having to pay the second highest transit fare in Latin America?

Evasion, 2019.

OK. But the best part was how fun it was. It was so fun that the following day, when we heard the shriek of students rushing down the escalators towards the turnstiles, that we ditched our free bus ride and rushed into the station. As if we had just scored the winning goal, the teenage rebels thrilled, chanting “If you don’t jump, you’re a cop!” as we hopped through the turnstiles they had liberated. We kept evading whenever we encountered fare-dodging actions that week, even if we didn’t really need a metro ride.

On October 18, I was supposed to give a talk at some friends’ anarchist ateneo [social center]. You were out on the town while I was back at my old apartment preparing. You WhatsApp’d me some videos of kids wilding out in the metro station. Was it really Los Heroes [a metro station]?1 You were at the center of history? God damn. I just YeahYeahYeah’d you because I had seen Chilean riots before. “Oh I’m glad you got to see that. We have to get ready to leave though.”

You—somehow—got back to my old apartment where we were staying. Knowing what I know now, I don’t even understand how you got there in time. But you were always good at finding me in the streets over the coming months, even when things got chaotic. What should have been a 45-minute commute to the ateneo took two and a half hours. Time can be elastic in Chile, sure, but it really shouldn’t take that long.

Somehow, we got there. No one else did, though. Over the months that followed, the coolest people I met flattered me with, “Oh, I was going to come to your talk that day! But then, well…”

The CrimethInc. presentation in Villa Francia on October 18, 2019.

As we waited for an audience, I saw two ten-year-olds walking down the middle of the street with a children’s couch the size of a playpen.

“There’s no way they’re gonna do what I think they’re gonna do to that couch, right?”

They did. Right onto the fire at the end of the block. We started to piece it together: what you had seen, no one at the event, the heavy traffic, this flaming barricade. Santiago was going off.

We crossed downtown to our friend’s apartment, closer to the action, but it turned out the action was everywhere. The husk of a bus. Smoldering buildings. At one point, our cab driver wasn’t sure what to do because the intersection had cops on one side and fighting encapuchados [masked heroes] on the other.

I was still YeahYeahYeah-ing your wide eyes when I left the following day, despite all my friends’ insistence that this was something special. When I got to the anarchist book fair in Buenos Aires—to give my talk again—the whole book fair was cancelled. They managed to get through a couple of the time slots, but everyone was talking about Chile. Looking at their phones. Cheering for our team whenever we struck a blow and expressing outrage every time there was news about repression. It didn’t take long for the organizers to pack it all in and just open up the social center so the whole book fair could simply watch the news from Chile.

My friend, one of the organizers, walked over to me while I was wide-eyeing the events on the television. He whispered to me, “Dude, why the fuck did you leave?”

The third time I tried to give my ill-fated talk, it was in the middle of the revolt, both temporally and territorially. Some anarchists had opened up a squat in one of the looted and abandoned businesses right by the main protest plaza. Enough people said they still wanted to see my talk—even though I didn’t understand why they would be interested in anything other than what was going on around us—that I decided to organize a presentation at the squat. Plus, I loved the space and wanted to keep it active. During talks there, one would regularly hear the uproar of revolt just outside the door, although we occasionally had to tuck our heads into our knees and wait out the wafting clouds of teargas.

Nobody came. The host had been optimistic, but after waiting a couple of hours, he informed me that the legendary 1970s Basque punk band, La Polla Records, was playing in a stadium that day.

Fifty years of punk rock in the middle of an insurrection: “No rest, no peace!”

“I don’t really like punk rock, so I didn’t mind opening up the space for you. But I guess everyone’s there.”

But I do like punk rock. So I grabbed my loosies and hopped on my bike.

Almost ten years ago now, five punks died in Santiago when bouncers violently beat back a rush of poor punks who were trying to get into a show where the British crust band Doom was playing. Wanting to avoid a similar situation—or simply intimidated by the uncontrollable, pay for nothing, fight for everything spirit that was consuming Chile—the security at the stadium would simply allow you to walk in without a ticket. I even took my bicycle in.

Inside the stadium, 15,000 punks were letting their hair down. Out in the plaza, every sector of the oppressed was present, and while we gave the cops our worst, we tried to be on our best behavior with each other because survival depended on our collective bonds. For example, a fragile truce existed during those months between the different soccer hooligan barras bravas so that they could fight the police together. On the rare occasions that fights did break out between demonstrators, everyone would chant “If you fight, you’re a cop! If you fight, you’re a cop!” Wild anarchist idealists went to the plaza with their most polished pitches to promote the values we believed would deepen the revolt.

Inside that stadium, however, the pressure was off. The plaza always had an element of carnival, but the La Polla Records show felt much more like a celebration of how far the anarchy had gone. If you know, you know, and everyone there got it—all punks—and we could just be bad because being bad together was so good. We didn’t need justifications or explanations, we could just enjoy the environment of collective, chaotic rebellion. While we had to mind our interactions on the frontline (“If you recognize me behind my mask, no you didn’t”), lest buchón sapo [Argentine, then Chilean, for “snitch”] plainclothes track our social connections, here in the stadium, those of us who had maintained a professional candor with each other in the streets could embrace and see the whole of each other’s faces erupting in radiant laughter.

Demonstrators snap a photo of the declaration of intra-hooligan, anti-police unity. It reads, “We lost too much time fighting among ourselves,” with each word atop the colors of a different team.

Everyone was sharing alcohol and weed and whatever else they had. A skinhead hooligan had hacked the stadium’s sprinkler system and was spraying mist over his section of the crowd under the hot summer sun. People climbed onto the sound tower and the roof of the stadium to hang banners in solidarity with the prisoners of the revolt and the Mapuche struggle or to dance silhouetted against the setting sun.

Here, the audience was in control—except the audience was totally out of control. Just a few songs into La Polla Records’ set, they had to stop in the middle of a song because too many enthusiastic hooligans had gotten on the stage and one had fallen into the drumset. They weren’t trying to stop the show, really. They were just excited.

A few more songs of the same, and one fateful fight between a bouncer who tried to suggest to a fan that he shouldn’t grab the singer’s neck in order to sing along, and the whole thing fell apart. Altogether, La Polla Records played something like five songs before abandoning the stage. As dusk came on, the atmosphere shifted from enthusiasm to anger.

15,000 punks rule! La Polla Records in Chile, February 2020.

15,000 grumbling punks and anarchists and hooligans and skinheads filed out of the stadium. Honestly, the amount of inward-facing frustration was so high that the most strategic choice the police could have made that evening would have been to allow the infighting to take its natural course. However, when there are thousands of punks occupying the road outside the stadium drinking and destroying traffic infrastructure, the pigs just can’t help themselves.

And neither could we. The most beautiful, glorious street battle of those six months unfolded before my eyes. We could see the police descending from up in the hills, so their arrival was anticipated. There was an air of “Here we go…”

Brightly colored mohawks bounced in and out of visibility amid clouds of tear gas. The most wildly dressed peacock punks engaged in feral smashing of beer bottles against police, while boom boxes provided a fast-paced tupa-tupa-tupa soundtrack to the riot. We didn’t see the best practices of gas masks, goggles, and gloves that the frontline used in the plaza. This was pure fuck you energy.

I had made a friend earlier that night while standing around selling cigarettes—but our befriending quickly accelerated when we realized we needed to rely on each other to get out of there safely. Even though they had, let’s say, much more reason to avoid capture by the police, on our first attempt to extract ourselves, they grabbed my arm and said, “Can we just watch it though?”

Yeah… except no! They were shooting shit at us! Dozens of punks rushed past us and, behind them, mechanical faceless stormtroopers advanced out of the gas clouds, arms drawn. We turned and ran.

In those six months, I mastered a whole audio taxonomy of booms—deep ones for the spent spray paint cans thrown into street fires, three different mid-level frequencies for different police projectiles, and the most piercing booms, fireworks. With the cops at our heels, we heard—BOOM—and instinctively I told my friend, “Jump!” No shit, a smoking canister hurtled under our feet. BOOM BOOM! Instinctively, again, “Duck!” This time, they went right over our heads.

“We absolutely have to get out of here.” We turned down a side street and wandered to the home of a friendly but ribbing communist who was excited to share his plan to subvert either the anarchist circle-A, or the constitutional process—I couldn’t tell which—by making a circle-A logo for the “Apruebo” (Approve) campaign for the constitution.

“Stop prohibiting so many things, I can’t keep up with disobeying them all.”

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Over the last five years, I’ve had the honor and privilege of sharing the material from this documentary in live presentations. In the days that this film depicts, every time I organized a talk, it was interrupted by the fiercest street confrontations in decades, or a people’s insurrection just across the border, or an uncontrollable wave of rioting punks. I wish that was still happening today. It’s better to do than to watch.

Since those days, I’ve presented the live version of Fell In Love With Fire within autonomous territory held in defiance of state power—in Weelaunee Forest, at a Los Panchos community in Mexico City, in People’s Park, where the audience sat on a trashed excavator left from the last riots to retake the park in 2022. It is my hope that this videozine, this documentalgo, can serve as tool to bring those kinds of spaces onto the map of other projects of rebellious self-determination across the globe and across time.

Please, don’t limit your use of this video to isolated viewing, nor to sterile, polite, seated events to raise funds. Use it to raise hell.

Their side.

Our side.

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You can download the English .srt subtitles file here to translate the subtitles into another language for us.

1. Los Héroes is not far from La Moneda, the metro stetion where kids dropped a televisión onto the tracks—shutting down the metro and setting off the chain reaction of revolt. ↩

 

Ostrom’s 8 Rules of the Commons for Anarchists

Oct

23

2024

comments

From Usufruct Collective

The commons are resources self-managed by communities who need and use them. Commons are managed through dialogue, deliberation, and collective-decision-making as well as through mutual aid to meet needs. Commoning refers to the process of developing commons. Commons can include land, water-ways, fields, factories, workshops, instruments/tools, dwellings, recreational facilities, general infrastructure, miscellaneous infrastructure, fruits of re/production, mixes of all of the above, and beyond. Flourishing commons provide communities and participants with shared means of existence, production, and politics as well as access to the fruits thereof in ways that meet the needs of all. 

The commons have been under attack by the last several thousand years of hierarchy and class society as well as the last several hundred years of capitalism. Capitalism developed through multiple factors including continuous privatization of the commons enforced through state violence (Federici, 2018). Despite such systemic violence, pockets of the commons continue to exist through people developing both new and enduring commons to meet their needs and the needs of others as well as through people resisting domination and exploitation (Federici, 2018). Commoning is not only under attack by multiple entangled forms of hierarchy (institutionalized domination) such as capitalism, statecraft, patriarchy, racism, imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism; commoning is also under ideological attack through widespread propaganda and belief systems that deem various hierarchies beneficial or inevitable. 

Arguments claiming that commons inevitably lead to tragedies of overuse and collective ruin deny the history of the commons while also assuming that commons are rooted in crude competitive acquisition without the very collective rules, agreements, and practices that enable them to be functional. Such straw men of the commons reflect the norms of competitive and hierarchical societies rather than the kinds of organized cooperation to meet needs so crucial to any well-functioning-commons. Responding to sweeping critiques of the commons, Elinor Ostrom empirically and theoretically demonstrated that commons have been, are, and can be well-managed by participants when they utilize several good-enough rules and practices (Ostrom, 2021). Many communities and persons have in their own ways and words convergently evolved and articulated variations of such core-design-principles. 

Commons and related self-managed institutions have existed within foraging societies, agricultural societies, villages, towns, blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and mixed method non-state societies (Boehm, 2001, Kropotkin 1902, Bookchin, 2005a, Federici, 2018, Ostrom, 2021, Graeber and Wengrow, 2023). Such a rich history demonstrates that well-managed-commons are possible and that such well-managed-commons predictably contribute to social and ecological flourishing. 

While there are plenty of examples Ostrom looks at that are in harmony with her 8 rules for managing the commons as well as a non-hierarchical approach to social-organization (Ostrom, 2021), other instances of the commons she looks at utilize some methods that those from an anti-hierarchical perspective would disapprove of. Truly emancipatory commons are distinct from quasi-commons that produce commodities and/or are gated against commoners having mutual-access (Federici, 2018). Given the goals of the self-management of each and all, mutual non-domination, wellbeing for all, and ecological flourishing, Ostrom’s core-design-principles can become more coherent through being remixed with insights from anarchism. 

The following adaptation of Ostrom’s rules for managing the commons is informed by libertarian socialism/communism/communalism, organizations and revolutions influenced by libertarian socialism that utilize community assemblies related to common decisions and resources, various commons Ostrom looks at, as well as an expanded history of commoning in multiple modes of subsistence:

1. Participants know they are part of a group and what the group is about (Wilson, 2016).
2. Agreements for sharing and at times rotating labor/work and implementation of decisions as well as for sharing the fruits thereof (Kropotkin, 1906, Sixth Commission of the EZLN, 2016, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2022). People can co-create a cornucopia where there is more than enough for all or otherwise agree to specific ways of distributing less abundant fruits of re/production according to needs.   
3. Direct collective decision making by participants through deliberation. For there to be self-management of each and all, there must also be mutual non-domination. By extension, community assemblies related to the commons should utilize direct, participatory, and non-hierarchical forms of democracy (Bookchin, 2005b).  
4. Organizational transparency that allows participants to mutually-monitor the commons (Atkins, Wilson, Hayes, 2019). This can happen through the process of co-managing and interacting with the commons, collective action, living in community with others, relevant accounting/calculation as needed, and availability of relevant information to participants. 
5. Graduated defense against domination and exploitation such as: informal social disapproval, self-defense and defense of others as needed, and recourse to expelling someone from a particular collective (through deliberation, assembly, and due process) in response to the most extreme violations of the commons and freedoms of persons (Boehm, 2001, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2023).  
6. Good-enough conflict resolution such as: people talking directly to each other, mediation to find out how to move forward, dispute resolution to resolve disputes, restorative justice and transformative justice processes for people to repair harm and transform causes thereof, and organization-wide assembly when the conflict is in regards to organizational form and content. (Kaba, 2019, Usufruct Collective, 2023). 
7. Communities and participants need sufficient autonomy to organize. 
8. The use of co-federation and embedded councils. Community assemblies can co-manage inter-communal commons in a way where policy-making power is held by participants and assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, Ocalan, 2014). This enables self-management and mutual aid within and between communities as well as inter-communal management of the commons. Community assemblies can utilize mandated and recallable councils and rotating delegates to implement decisions within the bounds of policies made by community assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, 2007, 2018). 

The above should be further fleshed out, qualified, and wisely adapted to conditions, needs, and desires of communities and participants. When there are good-enough institutions and agreements for collective action, individuals benefit through the flourishing of the commons and mutually-contributing to the commons– blending self-interest with collective-interest. Although specifically related to common-economics, Ostrom’s core-design-principles and coherent adaptations thereof can be used to reflect upon and develop various self-managed collectives that have shared practices and goals (Wilson, 2016). 

The self-management of each and all on every scale requires the flourishing of the commons and related general assemblies. Developing the commons in the context of a hierarchical society requires both the reconstruction of the commons as well as opposition to domination and exploitation. Such functions can be done through self-managed community assemblies that utilize mutual aid and direct action to meet needs and solve social problems. That kind of community organizing can happen as a crucial part of a broader social movement ecosystem that includes workplace organizing, student organizing, and beyond. In addition to the commons and related general assemblies being needed for political economic freedom of each and all: developing the commons and sharing social re/production can meet needs of social movement organizations, participants thereof, and the non-ruling class while building the new world in the shell of the old and increasing capacity for people to solve social problems and oppose hierarchies.

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PS:

Additional critique of Ostrom: 

Ostrom does want the commons to expand and increase. However, Ostrom sees the commons as a sector that should exist alongside capitalism and states. This is distinct from the anti-domination and anti-exploitation approach of libertarian socialism. While Ostrom does talk about the need to have sufficient autonomy to self-organize, Ostrom does not properly touch upon developing the commons through opposition against capitalism, statecraft, and hierarchy more broadly.   

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Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread. 1906.

Ocalan, Abdullah. Democratic Confederalism. Transmedia Publishing, 2014.

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Wilson, David Sloan. “The Tragedy of the Commons: How Elinor Ostrom Solved One of Life’s Greatest Dilemmas.” Evonomics, April 5, 2016. https://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/.

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